Harry Thorpe & CAUKIN: Co‑Production & Architecture for Social Change

What if a classroom could seed a local business, reshape gender norms on site, and stand strong through a category‑five cyclone? We sit down with CAUKIN co‑founder Harry Thorpe to unpack architecture’s role in driving education, gender equity, and climate resilience, tracing a bold path from student initiative to 60+ transformative projects across Asia, the South Pacific, Africa, and Europe..

We explore how co‑production—not just co‑design—anchors every stage, from forming the brief to sharing tools on site. Harry unpacks a Zambia case study with Mothers of Africa, where transparent decision‑making, mixed‑skill local crews, and young people‑led workshops turned four classrooms into a community engine. In Fiji, we look at practical resilience: buildings that survive extreme weather, then inspire families to replicate cyclone‑safe details using local materials. Along the way, we discuss working with NGOs, partnering with local architects and craftspeople, and tailoring drawings to different ways of learning so everyone can lead, not just follow.

When travel halted, CAUKIN pivoted. We talk about moving the model into UK schools and launching global virtual workshops that bring together architects, makers, and social practitioners. The practice has matured, too—developing “architecture plus,” where spaces come bundled with livelihood pathways, micro‑enterprise, and skills training that keep value in the community. We also confront the hard questions: where our agency starts and ends, when to design ourselves out, and how to sustain impact with fair fees in charity‑led work.

If you care about community architecture, humanitarian design, co‑production, education through building, and resilient, low‑carbon construction with local materials, this story offers practical tools and honest lessons. Subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a review to help more listeners find the show—and tell us: what does true co‑production look like in your world?

Chapters

• 0:09 Host And Mission Introduced
• 0:53 Meet Harry And His Role
• 1:46 School Subjects And Early Influences
• 3:29 Choosing Architecture Over Medicine
• 5:40 Founding Kokan As Students
• 8:16 Early Projects And Step Up In Scale
• 10:00 Finding Work And Working Locally
• 12:51 A Zambia School Project End To End
• 16:44 Co‑Production As Core Practice
• 19:43 Beyond Buildings: Lasting Community Impact
• 22:18 Cyclone Resilience And Replication
• 24:24 Pandemic Pivot To Education And Virtual
• 27:10 Maturing The Practice And Architecture Plus
• 29:20 Ethics, Agency, And Funding Realities
• 31:58 The Meaning Behind The Name
• 33:32 Closing And Listener Actions

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:09

Hello and welcome to another episode of Architecture for Kids Podcast. I'm your host, Antonika Blaun. I'm a trained architect, an architectural educator and founding director of award-winning Architecture for Kids CIC. In this podcast, I'm going to talk to practitioners and creatives that share the same passion as I do. To inspire and to engage children and young people to shape their built environment and the creative industries. The podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust, and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. My guest today is Harry Thorpe. Harry is founding director at KOCAN, and his role lies in the areas of stakeholder engagement, whether research and big picture thinking. Harry's role is crucial in ensuring that every Kokan project provides as many opportunities for impact as possible and that every stakeholder voice is heard. Through open communication with the collaborators and active engagement strategies with community and users, design techniques and workshops methodologies are always part of his careful consideration. He is always thinking ahead to possible systematic issues and challenges that could be solved through design thinking and in-depth research and analysis. Harry, thank you for coming to talk to me today, and I'm looking forward to our conversation. Hi, yeah, thank you so hard. What subjects were you good at school and what subjects seem to enjoy most if they were different?

SPEAKER_00: 1:51

Yeah, I'd say generally most of the subjects that I was good at were also the same subjects that I enjoyed actually. And I think as a kid or as a young person, as a self to realize I was good at certain subjects, started to enjoy them more and more. Obviously, the satisfaction of learning and achieving things to do progress kicked to quite a young age. Uh those subjects generally were uh things like maths, English, writing. I was really enjoying geography. But I think two subjects that were slightly different to those one was art. I think when I first started engaging more in art lessons, I never thought it was something that I would be good at. I thought it was something that you were just sort of gifted with and you either had it or you didn't. And I think I found sort of slightly later on um in my kind of educational journey, I guess, that it was more of a process. And one teacher really stands out when I was younger that told me about that process and that actually a lot of these motor skills you do learn over time, and that it's not just something you either have or you don't. And I think that actually really propelled arts to be one of my favorite subjects from one that I was quite anxious of and didn't really enjoy it at all. So once I learned that it was a process and you get better and better with lawyer practice and the different skills that you can kind of pick up, it became something that I loved. Then the only other subject I'd say that I really enjoyed it was almost the opposite. I really enjoyed it, but never was quite as good at it as I would have liked was physics. And that was from the standpoint of loving understanding of different things, how things worked. But then I think From made us a bigger conversation from the way that it was marked or the way that it was tested. Uh, I was never able to get sort of top rates, but I always really, really enjoyed it. Did this influence your career choices or how deep your career choices evolved? I'd definitely say it massively affected my career choices, obviously a natural kind of blend of humanitarian or humanities subjects like geography, history, and English, and subjects a lot more akin to uh studying architecture, arts, maths, and physics definitely kind of came together to result in architecture being the natural state. I was very much split between medicine and architecture, and I think that was maybe just pulling on the humanitarian social side of things. I think when I was younger, I was placed or given by careers advisors or what have you. Uh, this is one option or this is another. Rather than there's all of these different options, and how you go into them, how you express yourselves within them is is entirely up to you. Maybe if I was looking at it now and differently, but I think that architecture is always a really natural fit for me.

SPEAKER_01: 4:15

How supported were you in your choices? Your admission to career advisors, and when was at the moment that you said, okay, architecture is really what I want. And did anything in particular happen to make it that decision?

SPEAKER_00: 4:26

Yeah, I was really well supported. My school was great uh in terms of their and the career advising that we got. My parents were great. My two older sisters have both already gone to university, so I was drawn into that. This is the route that you should go, either consciously or subconsciously, it was something that I always wanted to do. I was always really, really ambitious in terms of wanting to learn more about all sorts of things, and it felt like university was the place to do that. I have to be completely honest, when I applied to do architecture at university, I thought it was something that I would enjoy, I thought it was something that my capabilities and my natural interests would be satisfied or tested. But I have to say, until I actually got to university and probably within year one and year two, did I really think architecture was definitely the career for me. I think even up until that point, it it wasn't something that I was 100% set on. And that definitely came out in or was definitely sort of dovetailing with the intersection of Cork in as a practice. I think the things that we were learning at architecture school were really exciting, the people we were learning from, the information that was being put in front of us, the skills that we were developing, and then that, as I say, dovetailed perfectly with a social and impactful, meaningful way of actually practicing the skills that we were learning.

SPEAKER_01: 5:40

Your practice, Corkin, I think it started as you were still a student. How did I do all the ethos?

SPEAKER_00: 5:46

Corking did come about in our second year of undergrads. There was a group of five or six of us, all with really similar interests in terms of practicing what we were learning, putting the theory that we were learning into the real world. We all liked the idea of traveling and learning from different cultures and finding out about different context, different ways in which people build and design, getting our hands on different types of materials, but also just as I say, enough for traveling and wanting to see things in different parts of the world. So I think it kind of came from that. I think the fact that we were still students really played to our advantage for the most part. We were able to like have full summers away, we were able to travel pretty lightly and pretty freely. We didn't have other financial or legal responsibilities. We were able to develop this practice. So at the time it was just collaboration of people as we kind of came together quite informally. And then over even the first year or two years, it re-formalized quite quickly as we started to realize this was something that we loved, that we enjoyed, but also that other people valued. And I think that was the turning point when we saw other people valuing what we were doing, both from a notional or conversational level, but also from a commercial level, when people were willing to put their money into what we were doing. And they re-spoke volumes about their believing in what we're doing in our ESOS. And IESOS was to create impact through the architecture that we were developing and that we were producing, whether that was through design workshops with people teaching through design or what we did from design or collaboratively learning from each other through design workshops. But also once we got on site, it was learning through doing. So learning from the drawings all the way through to the final details. And that was something that not only for us as students was really important, but also for the local communities we were working with, it was really important and gave to a degree a voice and to a degree some ownership of the structures that were going around them. And we were hopefully being that vehicle to let them be able to express that.

SPEAKER_01: 7:41

In a way, it's an opportunity to put in practice a lot of what was going on at university and a lot of ideas that you were experimenting with your learning in architecture, which I think is interesting. And you were saying about uh the freedom as a student uh to go somewhere and traveling and and so on, and all of those ingredients create the opportunity for the strong ring of practice. And tell us a bit about the project. You said a particular project that uh first stands out, or that's set up uh cooking, or just in general?

SPEAKER_00: 8:08

Yeah, so in terms of projects to date, we've been practicing now for around eight years, coming up to coming up to nine years this year. We've completed over 60 projects around the world, so across Asia and South Pacific, Africa, and and this year South America, and of course in the UK in Europe. I'd say of the projects in our earlier years, the ones that formed the practices at work would be the secondies. We went away in 2016. We went to Indonesia and built two projects there, and that was the first time we had students from different universities, people we'd never met before, coming as paying participants to learn on the workshops, on the courses. And that kind of took that first step up in professionalism, but also uh going beyond that first degree of friends and family and really pushed us to clone what we were doing and the way we were delivering it, how we were teaching, how we were learning for people that were paid to come away with us. But that massively reflected in how we then interacted with the community members and how everyone was involved in those open conversations around the design, around the logistics, around the funding. The following year, that was then magnified sort of tenfold when we went for the first time to Fiji and we built two new projects that were of a of a much, much larger scale. So we built a kindergarten and a community hall, and we'd gone from playgrounds the year before. So that massive step up meant a lot of a lot of steps up in other areas. So in intricacy, in the actual budget, in the level of design, and also in the amount of consultants we had to speak to, having structure engineers on board, having passive design specialists on board, all of these other things, and getting other contractors aside from ourselves, specialist contractors, to come in, whether it be for the foundations or other areas of timber framing, that really made us speed up the process and become much more professional practice as it would have, much more akin to what we are now as a practice.

SPEAKER_01: 9:58

There's two questions we do. One is how do you find these projects all over the world? And do you work with local craftsmen or local architects or local designers to help you to implement these projects? And you mentioned a playground. You said a particular type of project do you specialize as in do a lot of schools? Perhaps it'll be interesting to talk a lot about that.

SPEAKER_00: 10:18

A lot of that is all tied together naturally in terms of finding projects. Uh, towards the start of the practice, we were doing a lot of the outreach, looking for particular areas of the world, or sometimes even following things in the news, whether that be natural disasters or specific social issues that we'd identified and trying to get in contact with charities or NGOs and asking how we could help. That's very much flipped now, and we still do outreach, of course. If you can look for projects like any practice would, mostly through word of mouth, or again through pointed or directed email sort of outreach. But now, as I say, a lot of the projects coming to us. So a lot of uh charity and NGOs will come approach us and ask us if it's if their project is something we'd want to take on. And that has come, I guess, just through years of building our portfolio, building our name, getting it out there in various publications or talks or lectures or podcasts. And it's really helped us to speak about the way in which we practice, like hopefully I've gain and learn from other people. Every time we go to a talk or to a lecture or to a workshop, we're learning from everyone from first years of architecture school up to seasoned professionals or even retired architects, and more recently, kids of an even younger age at the university go to primary school, secondary schools, and learning from them as well. That's kind of been how the projects have developed in terms of actually obtaining work. The type of work that we obtain is really, really varied. We did start with playgrounds. That was something that we thought was manageable, was structurally something that we'd be capable of. And also naturally, as as we were we were young designers, it was something fun and playful, and also something that we thought uh the communities of those specific contexts would massively gain from. Then in terms of working with local people, that again is sometimes actually how we do obtain projects is local architects or craftspeople, uh, tradespeople might come to us and let us know about a project that's happening, or let us know about a project that they think needs to happen, and we'll then coordinate with charities in that area or NGOs in that area and try to put together a team of stakeholders, find someone within the funding area, someone within the administrative logistical area, uh, and then also all of the other specialists design professionals, whether it's be structural engineers or others uh that are needed as well. So it really is a kind of very fluid setup and it can come through online forums or it could come through just a friend of a friend in certain countries in the world. So it really is very varied.

SPEAKER_01: 12:39

Can you take us through uh an example of a project from the beginning where you are contacted to develop the project while we do delete grids so we have an an understanding of how does it work? It can be any project when anywhere in the world.

SPEAKER_00: 12:51

Yeah, one project that's bringing us to mind was through a contact actually at Cardiff University. So, Lady Professor Judith Hall, who works in the medical school, actually has her own charity that she's the chair patron of Good Mothers of Africa, and they reached out to us uh through university, uh through connections at the architecture school and the medical school and was looking for a practice to deliver a primary school for them or in addition to a primary school. This was back in 2019. She got in contact via email through the Global Opportunities Group at Cardiff University, which is overseas outreach group for students. They made her aware of our work. She then looked at our website, liked the projects that we'd done up to that point, and we set up a meeting. And after a very short amount of time, an introductory meeting, we definitely knew we were on the same page. We both wanted to create impact, we both wanted to help our young mothers and young children in the area they were working in. And very quickly, we put together an appointment proposal for her. We talked about what we could bring to the project, but how we could bring a layer of impact, a layer of meaning to a lot of the work otherwise just be done and delivered and passed on uh to a contractor and then eventually to the charity to run. We spoke to her about the way in which we work, which is uh being completely open and transparent throughout the whole process, uh keeping both the charity and the end user at the heart of the project from brief formulation all the way through to hand over a completed uh building. Uh and yeah, we went to work. We did the design work with mostly remotely with the community who were based out in Zambia. And uh, over sort of nine months or so, uh, we got uh the design all the way through to uh developed and technical design package. And whilst doing this, we were also putting the projects out online and marketing the projects to participants, which was something Judith was was really keen on as well. As an educator, she wanted to bring the students into the process too. So we had participants from universities all over the UK and even further afield across Europe and the rest of the world. They all signed up to come away with us for eight weeks and to help us deliver the build on site. So that was generally all the lead up to the project itself. The project was the construction of four classrooms and a teacher's office in Chongwe, which is a settlement about an hour and a half outside of the South Gael, the capital of Zambia. And we were there, as I say, for actually 60 weeks in total. But the participants were on site for eight of those, and from the very start and until completion, we had a local contracting team as well. That contracting team was made up of 50% male and female workforce. That was a really important aspect for the mothers of Africa as well, was to have a strong female presence on the side, something that generally isn't seen across Zambia and across a lot of other countries that we work in. Uh, and that was a no-brainer for us as well. A lot of our participants, around 70 to 80 percent of the people that come away to live online projects are female as well. So for us, that fit really nicely with our EFOS as well. As part of that, we also made sure to have a really healthy mix of skilled and unskilled local workforce. That meant that we could upskill and teach through the local contractors, people who had that local understanding of the materials of the process. They could actually teach both the participants, us as leaders, and also the unskilled local workers. The idea being that if we can upskill, then we can hopefully improve the opportunities for future employment as well for that. Throughout the process, we also had a lot of kids from the school interested in what we were doing. So they would come out and we'd have the workshops with them on site talking through various elements of what we're doing. If we were doing the foundations, explaining to why we're doing the foundations, how they worked. They weren't necessarily getting hands-on because of their age being primary school students, but we were trying to give them as much of an understanding around what's happening at their school as we could, and then towards the latter state of the building, the painting, the finishing, they were able to get more and more involved as well, which is something that we really welcome and it's something that we're happy to spend the extra time uh doing. If the client, the charity, the local school are receptive of it, something that we love to include in our builds as well. So that project was in 2019, as I say, in Chongway, and then 2022, a couple of years ago, we actually went back with the same charity again, building on that relationship and with the local community out there. And we actually built a kindergarten at a different primary school just down the road, probably 10-minute drive down the road. A lot of the communities out there had a little crossover, a lot of family uh within different local villages, so there's lots of familiar faces. And actually, on the first day of that project, when we were interviewing for uh local team members, loads of the Evergreen, the original primary school team, came back to interview and they had with them their list of references that we'd written for them at the last project, and not only that, they had steps of other lists of references that they'd obtained since our project. That really was kind of like a whole full circle moment where we felt like there's something happening and there's some sort of tricks-on effect. And whether we were directly responsible for that or not, we'll sort of never know that it's all part of that process, and it's something that there's little bits of feedback that make the job so much more rewarding.

SPEAKER_01: 17:34

So is it fair to say that a lot of the projects that you do or this example you gave is a co-production more than a co-design project with a community, or other?

SPEAKER_00: 17:44

I'd say actually co-production is the perfect term for it. We've talked about co-design, collaboration, all these other phrases and terminology that's out there in some box actual discourse. But I think co-production is definitely what we would term it as, and not being truly co-produced from, as I say, the essence of the project, the brief formulation, as well as physically co-producing the building itself. This is something that reflects across all of our work. It isn't just necessarily the international builds. It's something that we learned and that we honed through the international builds, but then when we've kind of recognized and mirrored that process, the stakeholder involvement, and then that kind of collaborative co-production and looking at ways in which we can bring people of different backgrounds, different levels of education, different levels of understanding, and actually different ways of learning. A lot of people that we work with have learned in completely different ways, in completely different context, and are experts in their field. And we find often even just the way that we present drawings, the way present projects, designs, has to be tailored, or our understanding and sensitivity to how they've learned, understood, or will be educated has to be taken into consideration when we talk about these things with them. So that's something that's that's been reflected across loads of projects, whether that be primary school, non-build educational workshop here in Wales, or whether it's a whole-scale secondary school or maternity centre in Uganda. And a lot of the processes we go through, a lot of the adaptive, flexible ways of co-producing are really, really transferable.

SPEAKER_01: 19:08

You've already mentioned a few of aspects that created significance to the community where you were talked about growth women in cultures where women are not seen working and design projects or architectural projects. You've also mentioned children, but talk a little bit more about this aspect of the project that we go and work with these different cities or these different villages. What do you really set up to achieve apart from the actual design project? How do you envisage the significance of that within the culture you're working with or that particular village or context?

SPEAKER_00: 19:43

The first thing that comes to mind, without sounding cliché or cheesy or anything like that, the way that we value a lot of our projects and actually, when we go back again, get the projects being used, the ones that are being the most successful, are the ones where we have integrated ourselves within the community in a way beyond just being there to build. We've actually gone there with the willingness, openness, and intention to make friends, to make lifelong connections. That's when the projects are successful. So in places like Fiji and a lot of the other countries that we visit, we actually live with families who are adopted into the village by families. We all split up in pairs or in threes, and we have a mother and a father and brothers and sisters, and we live with them and cook together, we clean together, you know, we share stories in the evening, talk about our families back home, and this kind of real connection, this connection on another level than just coming to sites, getting a job done, and the satisfaction from that, actually doing it with your friends, your new friends, is something that manifests itself within the building and within the fabric of the building. And we truly believe that. We truly believe that we go there to make these connections. We're all social beings, and building should reflect that. I think that's I don't know if that answers the question. I would say that's the most important part of what we do. Building is the vehicle, and the building that is left there is a manifestation of those memories, of those connections, of those relationships, and that unintentionally harbors an ongoing ownership, more learnings, a trickle on effect to younger generations, it's their dad that was part of that build, or their mum mixed the cobra to that foundation. That really starts to have a knock-on effect for generations to come.

SPEAKER_01: 21:16

Well, we believe that it were I was more interested, or I was trying to get at was the significance in terms of perhaps new ideas or different thinking about looking at this type of projects. The significance of that to the community. Apart from the building that you're going to do, how do you envisage that what you're doing will influence or will change or will affect the context of where you're working? Beyond that, the building is just a tool. Opening up creativity channels into people's self-confidence or bringing women into workforce where they're not used, those kind of things.

SPEAKER_00: 21:55

Yeah, I guess with a lot of our projects, uh, the main uh focus is to look for all the different places that we can create opportunities for people to better their lives, better themselves, to empower themselves. We try to look in every project, it's different. So we try to look for the opportunities of each one, whether that be, as you've mentioned, confronting gender bias within the construction industry, whether it's looking at social housing or ways of building in a safe way that can then trickle on to other people then owning their own homes. We've had projects in the past in the South Pacific that have been hit by category five cyclones, cyclones that are becoming more and more frequent, uh, and the whole village being decimated and only two or three buildings remaining, and one of those being one of ours, that building then being used as a refuge uh for cyclone and for the rebuilding effort, and then seeing photographs and videos of people that have replicated that design, have rebuilt their own homes in a way that is now category five cyclone resistant. That isn't by accident. We look into the ways in which we design, we work closely with structural engineers, passive design specialists, but we then layer on top of that a level of practicality and locality. So, how do we then create a building that is category five cyclone resistant, but is built by local materials that is affordable, that's replicatable in some of the most remote places to get to. And that then shows us that it's been successful when people are actually replicating it. We've had several different individuals that have come on our projects, uh local teams that have skills on site, whether that be welding, whether that be carpentry wood, who have then gone away and actually created their own companies off the back of it. Are using elements of our designs in Zambia, window casements, window and door designs that they're then selling on as the products to local people on other builds within Zambia, within Fiji, creating commercial opportunities for themselves. And obviously the tricks on effect is that they're then being able to live in a safer environment, in a more financially sustainable environment, and provide for their families as well. So we look for all of the different ways in which both the design, the structure itself, but also the education that's happening on site, looking at how it can have as many social, environmental, economical impacts as possible, or opportunities for that impact to occur.

SPEAKER_01: 24:08

You set up Bukan eight years ago. I'm not interested to find out how the pandemic has affected your work. A lot of the work you do was is abroad. And three years that we threw the pandemic, how did the work developed or how deep how did you operate then?

SPEAKER_00: 24:24

COVID and the pandemic had a huge effect on us. Uh, it was definitely a turning point or a milestone within the the journey of the practice. We were really starting to hit our straps and progress and the growth we could see it year on year. So then we hit, as you say, with no traveling. Um and for us, 80% of our projects, maybe even 90% of our projects at that point, were all overseas. And not only that, they were also overseas involving participants that had to travel to them. So for that to be completely taken away from us was a really big change. What we did was immediately look at the way in which we practiced, the people that we practiced with, the stakeholder model that we developed, and tried to think about the various different contexts here in the UK that that could apply to. That led us pretty quickly towards schools and the natural educational flow that does exist within our projects naturally led us to schools, to universities, to other educational groups, whether that be scout groups, community groups, lots of different areas within society that we thought that this model could help to benefit groups of people. We then moved the model from international to UK-based, and we also at the same time thought about how do we make our projects more accessible to people regardless of the pandemic. And one of those things was a virtual workshop. So we set up all platforms in which practitioners, people that we valued, people that we really love the work of internationally, and tried to bring that to one place online for students to learn from. So we've now run five virtual workshops. We're about to start another one this week, and we have lots of practitioners from all over the world, both in architecture, but in also other creative endeavors that we think are just as valuable and that the process is just as meaningful as well. So a lot of architectural adjacent practices that work in the grey areas between architecture, art, construction, community engagement, social working, and we bring all of those together for students to learn from. So those are kind of the two main things that we moved into. I NC educational projects in the UK. We've now worked with five different schools, we've worked with primary schools, secondary schools, we've worked at six forms, and we've worked at universities as well, delivering these kind of workshops where we try and put a lot of focus on the process rather than on the outcome of the work. And we get a lot of feedback sessions in there, people talking about how they found the process, what they did like, what they didn't like, what their involvement was, and what they've learned from that. And then on the other side, obviously the virtual workshops came into play as well. And that was much more about raising the awareness around this kind of model that we really value and that we think is really important, and also other practitioners that are doing likewise or different variations of that kind of model as well.

SPEAKER_01: 27:00

You set up Cobland for eight years, and how much has changed? And what has India arrives in and allow you to visit the practice or to move forward?

SPEAKER_00: 27:10

The practice, in terms of how it's changed, for us, it's completely unrecognizable from 2015 to now. The levels of professionalism, the levels of understanding, the levels of nuance and intricacy within both the social and the physical side of what we do has completely surpassed what we ever would have imagined as a second-year student certainity. In terms of moving forward, that kind of level of diversification, if you will, will continue into the future. So looking at more school-based projects, really developing what we do with the virtual and the online offering to people, but also the international, the international humanitarian development work that we do as well. The main area of development in terms of the international work will be looking at not only the construction and process and keep honing and refining the process that we have already with the co-production of projects and the stakeholder engagement, but it'll also be looking at architecture plus. So, like how does the building create more than just a safe space for the primary function? How can we look at business models, financial models, economic impact that these projects can have for the communities that they're serving? And we're looking at international entrepreneurial projects. So, how can we create whole companies or whole structures around these buildings or alongside or in collaboration with the charities and the partners that we're working with? And what do the community envision? Do they actually think that another building is the answer, or is there something else that's more commercially viable that will create more opportunities for them in the future? So looking at how we combine more holistically the building, the people, and the commerciality or the finances of all three and how that kind of all comes together and what our involvement is and what our agency is within that as practitioners. So moving a little bit away from architecture, but in a way that still kind of engages with it and uses it as the vehicle to produce those opportunities.

SPEAKER_01: 29:04

What are the main challenges in terms of the practice and the current social and political economical environment globally?

SPEAKER_00: 29:13

For us, the main challenges come around our awareness and our sensitivity to what our involvement should be. We're constantly questioning and thinking about where our agency starts and ends within these projects, who the projects are for, and rightly or wrongly, what our involvement should be as a practice, and how much we should be influencing the outcomes of the buildings and how much that should just be led by the end user. I think that what we're trying to do is create opportunities for other people, and therefore our long term goal is to sort of design ourselves out of the process. The idea is to create localized teams or to encourage or provide opportunity for localized teams to essentially displace us. So I guess our challenge is to be aware. Of those timelines and be sensitive to when our involvement should be reduced and when we should then pull ourselves out of the projects entirely. I think on a global scale, we have a huge number of social and environmental challenges that face all of us. And I think that finding ourselves and our place within that is something that we have to do on a daily basis with all of our different projects. More longer term, the big challenge to the practice is that we're all getting older. And so that people, how our lives can intertwine with this quite demanding way of practicing and who takes over, how do they do that, and when it's right to do that, I suppose. Another big challenge for us to practice, which is a challenge for all practices in the architectural industry, is definitely the financial sustainability of what we do and how we exist. This is exacerbated uh working on our international development projects, working with charities and NGOs with limited budgets, red line budgets that can't be crossed. So we have to be very mindful about how we're spending our time, how efficient we can be in designing and delivering projects. It's money and it's it's funding that otherwise would be spent on really meaningful activities for the charities or NGOs that we're working with. This sort of again dovetails with starting the practice as young architectural students. Something that's taken us a long time to understand is actually the value of our work and what we do as practitioners. I think starting with students with limited responsibilities and limited things that we had to be at. Starting the practice as secondary architectural students and not having financial responsibilities like a house, like children. We were able to do the work on a shoestring budget and on very, very low fees. But we found as we progressed and as we've gotten more work that that actually is devaluing what we're producing and that it's actually putting us in a financial position as a practice that is that is untenable. So I think something we've learned throughout those eight years is actually to place value on what we do and what we produce, on the experience that we have. And that's that's crucial when it comes to the sustainability of the practice.

SPEAKER_01: 31:57

Is that a question I should have answered that everyone asked you? And what is it, question?

SPEAKER_00: 32:01

The question that comes to mind is around the name Corkin Studio, and why we're called that, because it does have a meaning to it, and that has developed over time. Corkin stands for the three founding countries that the five of us that founded the company are from. So we've got Canada, the UK, and Indonesia. And that was made up of five of us students whilst we were at university, coming together from different corners of the world, meeting in Cardiff serendipitously, and deciding that we wanted to start a practice that did more than just design and build buildings. As the practices developed over time and people's lives have changed and things have pushed and pulled us in different directions, we now practice in a very different way. We're not all in the same place all of the time. One of our founding members who is Canadian has actually moved over to New York and practices over there in a different area of design. Our other founding member from Indonesia now lives in Singapore and runs a very successful architectural practice over there. Three of us based in the UK are still here practicing for corking and running corkin full-time. And we were really uh lucky, although a lot of a lot of the luck was was from the hard work that we put in, that we were able to go from university straight into the practice, the three of us here in the UK. So we went for our masters, we had enough of an on-ramp of projects to go straight into it. And we now practice from the UK, from Cardiff, and from London, and we work almost entirely remotely as a free running practice. The inception of the practice and the name reflects the international multicultural and multi-directional approach that we all had as students from different places. And we hope that that still reflected the work that we do now as well. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01: 33:33

Thank you very much to my guests today, to all the listeners, and please subscribe to Architecture for Kids Podcast and leave your rating and the review. Recommend us to your friends and family, and to find out more about it, visit our websites Antonio Kaplung Portfolio.co.uk, Buildingcentre.co.uk, Thorntoneducation Trust.org, Cardiff.ac.uk and follow us on Instagram, arch4kids, Twitter and Kaplang, LinkedIn and Kaplang, C E P E L A O. And please join me again next week for another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast, brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust, and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University.